About Will Haslun
I paint places—mostly New York. Architecture, parks, street scenes. The work starts with looking: walking the city, noticing how light hits a building or how a crowd moves through a space.
By training, I'm a corporate attorney — credit facilities, secured transactions, the architecture of complex deals. I spent years at firms like Skadden and Kirkland building documents that had to be precise and internally consistent. Watercolor is a different discipline but a similar attention: you're constructing something that has to hold together, except the medium pushes back and you can't control it the way you can control a defined term.
I'm largely self-taught as a painter. I have spatial synesthesia, which lets me hold a three-dimensional space in my mind and move through it. In legal work, this helps me navigate complex agreements mentally. In painting, it helps me maintain perspective as I build up a scene.
Law trained me to care about precision. Watercolor keeps teaching me that precision isn't control. You work with what happens on the page, fix what you can, and leave the rest as evidence that a human was here.
